Introduction
You live in a time when objective facts seem to lose power against emotional appeals and political agendas. You might wonder how falsehoods spread so quickly and why evidence fails to change minds. Lee C. McIntyre analyzes this phenomenon in Post-Truth, showing that this condition is a deliberate tool for ideological supremacy.
Post-truth occurs when objective facts are eclipsed by emotional appeals and personal beliefs, threatening democracy and informed public discourse.
To understand how reality became negotiable, you must examine the mechanics of denial and human psychology. The book guides you through coordinated science denial, cognitive biases, media collapse, and the role of social media. It also investigates whether academic relativism paved the way for these attacks on truth.
You will find answers to several critical questions as you read:
- How did organized campaigns first teach industries to deny established science?
- Why do human brains instinctively reject facts that challenge their core beliefs?
- What economic pressures turned traditional journalism into partisan entertainment?
- How do algorithms and fake news accelerate political polarization online?
- What practical steps can you take to fight the spread of post-truth?
1. What Is Post-Truth
Objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals and personal beliefs. This dynamic serves as a tool for political dominance.
Post-truth occurs when objective facts are rendered irrelevant by emotional appeals and political agendas.
The prefix post indicates that truth has been eclipsed and rendered irrelevant rather than left behind temporally. Practitioners of post-truth attempt to bend reality to fit their opinions. They select, shade, and present facts within a political framework that favors their agenda.
Oxford Dictionaries named post-truth the 2016 word of the year after a 2000 percent spike in usage over 2015. This spike was driven by the Brexit vote and the US presidential election.
Subverting truth takes many forms:
- a falsehood is an unintentional mistake;
- willful ignorance involves speaking without checking easily available facts;
- lying crosses the line into intentional deception of an audience;
- bullshitting demonstrates a careless indifference toward what is true;
- pure post-truth involves actual delusion where individuals believe untruths despite credible refutations.
The New York Times formally labeled Donald Trump's repeated claims about winning the popular vote as a lie just three days into his presidency. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. Seventeen American intelligence agencies reached a consensus on Russian election hacking, yet doubters dismissed the findings.
Post-truth operates as a form of ideological supremacy. You might apply a double standard of extreme doubt toward facts you dislike and total credulity toward favorable narratives. Deniers and ideologues corrupt the credible process of gathering and utilizing facts because they only want to accept information that justifies their pre-existing beliefs.
South African President Thabo Mbeki claimed antiretroviral drugs were part of a Western plot. He advocated garlic and lemon juice for AIDS, resulting in over 300,000 deaths caused by AIDS denial in South Africa. When leaders and societies deny basic facts for political convenience, the real-world consequences can be disastrous.
2. Science Denial as a Road Map
Modern post-truth tactics were forged through decades of coordinated science denial campaigns.
The tactics used in the modern post-truth era were originally forged decades ago through coordinated campaigns of science denial. Before factual reality as a whole became a battlefield, corporate and ideological interests attacked scientific consensus on topics like tobacco and climate change. These campaigns established the playbook of manufacturing controversy, funding alternative experts, and lobbying governments.
Right-wing attacks on climate science and evolution served as a prior proving ground for political attacks on verifiable data like government photographs and crime statistics.
The modern strategy of manufacturing doubt was invented by the tobacco industry in 1953 to counter scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer. Faced with studies showing cigarette tar caused cancer in mice, tobacco executives formed a unified public relations front. Rather than proving their product safe, they aimed to convince the public and media that there was no scientific proof and that valid controversy existed.
The Tobacco Industry Research Committee placed full-page advertisements in American newspapers reaching 43 million people to cast doubt on settled science.
To successfully delay regulation, you can follow this proven playbook:
- Find and fund your own experts
- Use sponsored experts to suggest to the media that there are two sides to the story
- Push your side through public relations and governmental lobbying
- Capitalize on resulting public confusion to question scientific results
Fossil fuel interests adopted the tobacco industry's playbook to manufacture artificial controversy and public confusion regarding anthropogenic climate change. Organizations funded by oil and energy fortunes systematically worked to undermine climate science education and promote skepticism despite an overwhelming scientific consensus. Leaked internal strategy documents revealed explicit plans to train independent scientists, establish front organizations, and lobby lawmakers.
The Heartland Institute received 7.3 million dollars from ExxonMobil between 1998 and 2010. It also received 14.4 million dollars from Koch-affiliated foundations between 1986 and 2010 to promote skepticism about man-made climate change, despite 97 percent of peer-reviewed climate papers agreeing that global warming is caused by human activity.
3. The Roots of Cognitive Bias
Human evolution and psychology leave individuals vulnerable to ego defense, confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning.
Rooted in human evolution, ego defense makes it feel better to believe that you are smart and capable than to admit a falsehood. You experience psychological tension when facing uncomfortable truths, but maintaining self-value usually takes precedence over empirical reality.
Leon Festinger's 1957 experiments showed that subjects paid only $1 to perform a boring task rated it as much more enjoyable than those paid $20. Their ego was at stake, so they needed to justify doing a useless task for a dollar.
People are highly susceptible to social pressure and will discount the direct evidence of their own senses to remain in harmony with the unanimous opinions of a peer group. Solomon Asch demonstrated that social conformity exerts immense force on human judgment. When faced with unanimous peer pressure contradicting clear visual evidence, you experience high psychic tension and often yield to the group consensus.
In Solomon Asch's 1955 experiment on opinions and social pressure, 7 to 9 subjects were assembled. Subjects were asked to match line lengths after confederates unanimously chose an obviously incorrect line, causing 37 percent of subjects to yield to the false majority opinion.
Humans systematically fail to test hypotheses rigorously, preferring instead to seek out instances that confirm their preexisting beliefs while ignoring disconfirming evidence. Peter Cathcart Wason discovered that individuals struggle with conceptual tasks because they are unwilling to test falsifying instances. Instead of trying to disprove an intuitive rule, you keep proposing confirming examples, trapping yourself in confirmation bias.
In Peter Cathcart Wason's 1960 experiment involving 29 college students tested with the 2, 4, 6 initial number series, most students repeatedly offered numbers that confirmed their initial guess rather than trying to falsify their hypothesis. This led them to incorrect rules.
Motivated reasoning causes you to process information within an emotional context, shading perceptions and beliefs based on what you hope to be true. Because you reason within an emotional framework to eliminate psychic discomfort, your desires heavily color your perception of facts. Brain imaging studies show that political partisans engage entirely different neural regions when evaluating information that threatens their preferred candidate.
During the context of the 2004 U.S. presidential election, 30 committed political partisans evaluated statements threatening their own candidate during an fMRI scan. Distinct neural circuits lit up compared to when they processed neutral content.
When presented with factual corrections that challenge political views, partisans sometimes reject the evidence and double down on false beliefs. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler discovered the backfire effect. Corrective information can cause certain individuals to become even more firmly committed to mistaken misconceptions.
In a 2010 study by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, conservative subjects who were given a correction stating that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction became more likely to believe Iraq had WMDs compared to the control group.
Low-ability individuals are often profoundly incapable of recognizing their own ineptitude, leading to drastically inflated self-assessments across various domains. David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that incompetence robs people of the very meta-skills needed to evaluate competence. The greatest inflation in perceived ability consistently comes from the lowest performers, who suffer from self-deception rather than mere dishonesty.
In a 1999 experiment by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, 45 intelligent undergraduates were tested. Undergraduates who scored at the 12th percentile on an LSAT logic test mistakenly believed their general logical ability fell at the 68th percentile.
Political orientation influences susceptibility to threatening falsehoods, with conservatives showing a higher probability of believing fearful misinformation. Research by Daniel Fessler demonstrates that negativity bias makes individuals along the political spectrum more or less skeptical depending on whether statements warn of negative outcomes. This leaves right-leaning audiences more fertile ground for conspiracy theories.
Daniel Fessler presented subjects with 16 statements varying from innocuous to highly threatening in his credulity study. He found that for each tick rightward on the political spectrum, subjects grew 2 percent less skeptical of warnings about bad outcomes.
Active deliberation and robust group scrutiny help you overcome individual cognitive biases and solve complex problems that no single person could solve alone. Drawing on Cass Sunstein's research on infotainment, the author highlights that interactive deliberative groups outperform passive individuals. When people actively challenge and scrutinize each other's reasoning, collective problem-solving yields accurate results that elude solitary thinkers.
In experiments led by J. C. Wason, groups of subjects given difficult logic puzzles that few could solve individually were able to successfully solve them through active debate and mutual critique.
4. The Decline of Traditional Media
The golden age of traditional print and network journalism suffered a massive collapse in readership and viewership over the second half of the twentieth century. Early newspapers and network news divisions operated as well-funded monopolies or loss leaders subsidized by entertainment profits. The rise of cable and 24-hour news drastically eroded their market share and transformed the economic model of news into a competitive, profit-driven enterprise.
Economic collapse and partisan programming transformed journalism into an incubator for confirmation bias.
In 1950, U.S. daily newspaper circulation was 53.8 million, or 123.6 percent of households, but by 2010 it fell to 43.4 million, representing just 36.7 percent of households. Talk radio pioneered the monetization of political alienation by creating insular communities centered on partisan agreement rather than objective debate. Hosts like Rush Limbaugh positioned themselves as alternative truth-tellers opposed to mainstream media, utilizing screened call-in formats to foster a sense of shared community among listeners who already shared the same political inclinations.
Rush Limbaugh built a massive national following after starting his broadcast, eventually being heard on more than six hundred stations nationwide. Following the success of talk radio, networks like Fox News and MSNBC abandoned the pursuit of absolute objectivity in favor of delivering opinion-driven content that reflected what viewers wanted to believe. MSNBC was founded in July 1996, and Fox News launched in October 1996.
Fox News executive directives instructed producers to suppress discussions of gun control immediately following the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. A content analysis study revealed that 68 percent of Fox News stories reflected personal opinions, compared to 4 percent of CNN stories. Another study from 2013 showed that 69 percent of Fox News guests were skeptical of climate change, compared to 29 percent of Los Angeles Times guests and 17 percent of Washington Post guests.
The journalistic reflex to provide balanced reporting on factual matters inadvertently creates false equivalence and distorts public understanding. To counter accusations of liberal bias and maintain an appearance of fairness, traditional media outlets routinely give equal time to fringe or partisan contrarians, treating settled scientific facts as if they were matters of ongoing controversy.
Renowned climate scientist James Hansen was informed by a public television producer that a program about global warming must include a contrarian to satisfy balance requirements. Special interest groups systematically exploit journalistic norms of objectivity to manufacture doubt and obscure scientific consensus. Industries with financial stakes in topics like climate change or public health pressure journalists into featuring unqualified skeptics, successfully shifting public perception away from established scientific consensus.
Following discredited and fraudulent research linking vaccines to autism published in 1998 by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, split-screen debates fueled public panic. Plummeting vaccination rates led to a measles outbreak across 14 states that affected 84 people.
Public trust in mass media has plummeted to historic lows amidst an environment dominated by partisan sources and repeated political attacks on journalism. As the boundary between traditional reporting and alternative media blurs, relentless labeling of critical reporting as dishonest has drastically eroded public confidence in journalistic institutions. Gallup poll data demonstrated that American trust in the mass media dropped from a high point of 72 percent in 1976 down to a new low of 32 percent in recent years.
5. The Rise of Social Media and Fake News
The rise of the Internet and web news caused a catastrophic decline in print newspaper circulation, reducing advertising revenue and newsroom staffing. As newspapers cut staff and pages to save money, they sacrificed editorial quality, while the public increasingly turned to free news sources on social media.
Pew Research Center reported that newspaper weekday circulation fell 7 percent and Sunday circulation fell 4 percent in 2015, while newsroom workforce shrank by 39 percent over 20 years. This equals about 20,000 positions lost since 1984, which was the peak year for print newspaper circulation in the United States.
Cable television networks enjoyed record profits during the 2016 election by providing saturation coverage of Donald Trump. Networks profited immensely from high viewership by running Trump's rallies live and in full without vetting, creating a false equivalence and giving him billions in free media.
CNN reported $1 billion in gross profit for 2016, and daytime viewership grew significantly across Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. Fox News projected $1.67 billion in profit, while daytime viewership grew 60 percent for Fox, 75 percent for CNN, and 83 percent for MSNBC. Cable news networks gave an estimated $5 billion in free media to Donald Trump during the 2016 election.
Algorithmic curation and weaponized disinformation on social media accelerate political polarization and fake news.
Social media platforms transformed news consumption, driving polarization and confirmation bias by replacing editorial vetting with algorithmic curation and peer sharing. Users increasingly bypassed traditional news sources to get content on platforms like Facebook, where algorithms and personal networks feed confirmation bias and create echo chambers.
Facebook was created in 2004, YouTube was founded in 2005, and Twitter followed in 2006. A Pew poll showed that 62 percent of US adults get news from social media, with 71 percent of that coming from Facebook, representing 44 percent of the total adult US population.
Fake news is not a modern invention and has recurred throughout history, notably during the era of yellow journalism in the late nineteenth century. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 and the telegraph spurred various forms of unverified and partisan reporting. Newspaper magnates deliberately used sensationalism to spark conflicts like the Spanish-American War after New York newspapers organized the Associated Press in 1848 and before the New York Times shifted to an information model in 1896.
William Randolph Hearst allegedly told his Havana correspondent you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war, publishing fake drawings and exploiting the explosion of the USS Maine that killed 250 Americans in 1898.
Fake news evolved from clickbait designed for financial profit into weaponized disinformation used for political manipulation during the 2016 election. Creators in places like Eastern Europe and the United States discovered that pro-Trump and anti-Hillary stories generated significantly more web traffic and ad revenue, morphing into political sabotage.
Beqa Latsabidze in Georgia and Cameron Harris in the US created viral fake news articles for ad revenue, such as a false story about fraudulent Clinton votes in an Ohio warehouse shared with six million people. Cameron Harris made $5,000 from his fake news story in a few days.
Propaganda goes beyond mere deception; according to Jason Stanley, its ultimate goal is to build allegiance, assert political dominance, and rule through authority over truth. Political leaders use propaganda techniques like open defiance of reality and scapegoating to weaken the distinction between fact and fiction, steering societies toward authoritarian politics.
Karl Rove dismissed critics as the reality-based community and noted that we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.
Combating fake news requires structural changes from tech giants, flooding platforms with vetted journalism, and teaching critical thinking skills to students. While tech companies like Facebook and Google, which account for 85 percent of all new online ad revenue in the United States, struggle to filter misinformation without accusations of bias, educators and fact-checkers advocate for supporting investigative journalism and equipping students with verification rubrics. Fifth-grade teacher Scott Bedley successfully taught his students a rubric to spot fake news through classroom games and testing examples.
You can evaluate online claims by applying specific verification steps:
- Look for copyright.
- Verify from multiple sources.
- Assess the credibility of the source.
- Look for a publication date.
- Assess the author’s expertise with the subject.
- Ask: does this match my prior knowledge?
- Ask: does this seem realistic?
6. Did Postmodernism Lead to Post-Truth
Beginning in the 1980s in humanities departments, thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault taught that texts and societal behaviors should be deconstructed because absolute truth does not exist and language is saturated with dominance relations. Academic relativism and deconstruction provided intellectual foundations later co-opted by right-wing ideologues to attack science.
Scholars applied deconstruction to natural sciences during the Science Wars, claiming scientific theories were merely socially constructed narratives rather than objective discoveries about nature.
In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of extreme academic relativism by successfully publishing a deliberate nonsense paper in a leading postmodern journal. Sokal submitted a parody article full of postmodern clichés and absurdities about quantum gravity to the journal Social Text, proving that editors accepted nonsense if it flattered their ideological preconceptions and lacked rigorous peer review.
Alan Sokal published his parody paper entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in Social Text.
Techniques originally developed by the academic left to question objective truth were eventually co-opted by right-wing ideologues to attack established scientific consensus. Although some critics argued that conservatives would never read obscure French philosophy, figures like Intelligent Design creationism founder Phillip Johnson explicitly adopted postmodern and sociological-of-knowledge tactics to undermine evolutionary science.
Philosopher Robert Pennock documented how Phillip Johnson and the Discovery Institute used postmodern arguments to frame evolution as merely one narrative among many and promote Intelligent Design.
Alternative media figures and alt-right bloggers leveraged postmodern narratives and conspiracy theories to shape mainstream political discourse. Blogger Mike Cernovich utilized alternative media platforms to push fabricated conspiracy theories and attack mainstream journalistic authority by treating news as mere perspective and competing narratives.
Mike Cernovich pushed fake stories like Hillary Clinton's health decline and the Pizzagate conspiracy, and later received praise from Donald Trump Jr.
7. Fighting Post-Truth
In a post-truth era, you must actively challenge lies and confront falsehoods rather than ignoring them under the assumption that they are too outrageous to be believed. When liars promote false narratives, failing to respond allows misinformation to fester and pushes uneducated audiences deeper into denialism.
John Kerry lost the 2004 presidential election after choosing not to dignify the false claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth with an immediate response.
You need to apply practical rules to counter deception:
- challenge each and every attempt to obfuscate a factual matter;
- challenge falsehoods before they are allowed to fester.
Motivated reasoning and cognitive bias have limits; continuous exposure to disconfirming facts can eventually overcome partisan resistance and force people to update their beliefs.
Experimental research shows that voters and partisans do not engage in motivated reasoning ad infinitum. Hitting people repeatedly with factually correct information can reach an affective tipping point where they resolve cognitive dissonance by accepting the facts.
Republican Mayor James Cason of Coral Gables became a climate change believer and warning advocate after hearing expert lectures on rising sea levels directly threatening his city. Coral Gables, Florida sits at a current elevation of 9 feet above sea level.
The post-truth phenomenon can escalate into a pre-truth era of magical thinking where leaders believe their own assertions or desires actually possess the power to shape physical reality. In what commentators term Trumpspeak, truth is entirely transactional and defined by whether a statement advances political goals or subjective beliefs, treating mere assertion as proof that creates its own reality.
President Donald Trump insisted his instinct was right and claimed vindication after an offhand comment about Sweden supposedly predicted a real riot that occurred days later.
10 Key Ideas
- Post-truth occurs when objective facts are rendered irrelevant by emotional appeals and political agendas.
- The tactics used in the modern post-truth era were originally forged decades ago through coordinated campaigns of science denial.
- Rooted in human evolution, ego defense makes it feel better to believe that you are smart and capable than to admit a falsehood.
- Humans systematically fail to test hypotheses rigorously, preferring instead to seek out instances that confirm their preexisting beliefs while ignoring disconfirming evidence.
- Economic collapse and partisan programming transformed journalism into an incubator for confirmation bias.
- Algorithmic curation and weaponized disinformation on social media accelerate political polarization and fake news.
- Creators in places like Eastern Europe and the United States discovered that pro-Trump and anti-Hillary stories generated significantly more web traffic and ad revenue, morphing into political sabotage.
- Academic relativism and deconstruction provided intellectual foundations later co-opted by right-wing ideologues to attack science.
- Motivated reasoning and cognitive bias have limits; continuous exposure to disconfirming facts can eventually overcome partisan resistance and force people to update their beliefs.
- In a post-truth era, you must actively challenge lies and confront falsehoods rather than ignoring them under the assumption that they are too outrageous to be believed.